Psychiatric Drugs

I am flattered and pleased to have been asked by MadInAmerica to post here the letter PsychRights wrote Monday to Vice President Biden regarding the misguided, counterproductive and very dangerous focus on identifying and forcing "treatment" on people diagnosed with mental illness as any part of the solution to gun violence in the United States.

In response to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, ISEPP, a non-profit mental health research and education network, issues a statement calling for a...

The former director of a California nursing home has been sentenced to 3 years in prison for inappropriate medication of 23 individuals. All of...

In early 2009, antipsychotic fraud was making headlines.  Eli Lilly had announced in January that it would plead guilty to charges that it had...

Canadian researchers systematically reviewed all randomized controlled trials of second-generation antipsychotics (SGAs) and placebo in the treatment of disruptive behavior disorders in children, finding...

Research from the medical schools of Harvard University and the University of Melbourne, reported in the December International Journal of Eating Disorders, found that...

The Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry has chosen not to retract Martin Keller's study of Paxil in children ("Study...

by Eugene Epstein, Manfred Wiesner, and Lothar Duda Over the past 50 years, the psychiatric and psychotherapeutic discourses of the western first world have infiltrated...

Allen Frances, writing in the Huffington Post, calls the decision in the forthcoming DSM-5 to call grief in the bereaved a disorder as soon as...

David Kupelian, editor of Whistleblower magazine, reviews the evidence for a role of psychiatric medication in violent events such as the Sandy Hook tragedy...

Robert Whitaker's keynote presentation in Brighton, England explores the problems of the evidence base at the heart of the medical model, particularly for ‘psychosis’, and discusses the Open Dialogue approach from Finland.

An editorial in Thorax reviews the evidence for an association between mental illness, benzodiazepine use, and pneumonia. The authors find an equally augmented rate...

A team from Ireland, Finland and Sweden found, in a study of all those born in Helsinki in a 30-year period (1960 to 1990)...

An Austrian study of the baseline prevalence of metabolic abnormalities and changes following treatment with five commonly-used antipsychotic drugs (haloperidol, amisulpride, olanzapine, quetiapine or...

Yesterday, Dr. Daniel Fisher emailed and asked my thoughts with regard to “recovery”. Even before I walked away from prescription-pad-only psychiatric work, others asked me about this. Other treatment providers, designated patients and family members asked what I thought they could expect to happen next and what they should do to make things better. I told them that chemical interventions are not the only, or even the essential, tool for recovery.

There used to be a wonderful cartoon series called 101 Uses for a Dead Cat, which led me 25 years ago to give a talk at a British Association for Psychopharmacology meeting entitled 101 Uses for a Dead Psychiatrist. That was back in the days when Psychopharmacology meetings were places of debate and the British Journal of Psychiatry was guaranteed to have something of real interest in every issue.

CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta looks at the roles of trauma and medication as a "common factor" in tragedies similar to the Sandy Hook shooting....

I hope this post doesn’t seem like a stretch, because it’s about something so basic it’s almost embarrassing: Walking, the intuitive act of putting one foot in front of the other to carry you from one place to the next. Yet if you’ve ever endured damage or a withdrawal syndrome from a psychiatric medicine, you’ll also know that things, like walking, that look and seem basic to others, and that did so in your past, “pre-medication” life, do not in fact come easily. Sometimes, on the worst days, they don’t come at all.

(This commentary originally ran on Beyond Meds) In his New York Times op-ed entitled “Our Failed Approach to Schizophrenia“ Paul Steinberg, a psychiatrist in private practice, proposes we...

An unidentified man who matched the description of an "eloped" patient was brought to Graylands Hospital in Perth, where he was injected with an...

Pharmalot has just posted a piece - 'Controversial FDA official, Tom Laughren, retires.' This is a must read for anyone with anything to do with mental health - both the post and the comments afterwards where some have posted that they still believe the Black Box warnings on antidepressants arose because of pressure from the Church of Scientology rather than in response to the data.The post will likely seem boring to many. But the comments won't - they seethe with anger.

A petition on the White House web site which calls for an investigation into the link between psychiatric medication and violence has been blocked...

Questions have been circulating about whether Adam Lanza had been taking psychotropic medications. We hope that the inquiry into the mass murder will determine what psychotropic medications he may have been on. Meanwhile, Catherine Clarke and Jan Evans research paper "Neuroleptic Drugs and Violence" is archived on Madinamerica, and may shed further light on why this question arises in the context of these terrible events.

This is the third time in less than two years that I’m writing an article about young men walking into public venues and shooting a dozen or more people at a time --- first Tucson, then Aurora, now Newtown. The Newtown killer, Adam Lanza, didn’t just walk into the Sandy Hook elementary school where he shot and killed 26 persons, he broke in, determined to carry out the plan he had. “Why?” and “Where Next?” seem to be the questions we are always left with, along with “How can we prevent this from happening again?” Many Americans are also asking, finally, “What is happening to this country?”

I do not understand how we can continue to avoid the conversation about psychiatric medications and their role in the violence that is affecting far too many of our children, whether Seung-Hui Cho, Eric Harris, Kip Kinkel, or Jeff Weise (all of whom were either taking or withdrawing from psychotropic medications) or the scores of children and adults they have killed and harmed. It is not clear what role medications played in the Newtown tragedy, though news reports are now suggesting there is one.